7 ms·

How I built an application in two days

48 points by rm2kdev 13y ago

gremlinsinc 13y ago
Nice design/layout, not bad for a 2 day project.
- rm2kdev 13y ago
  Thanks, i cant take all the credit i am using twitter bootstrap for the ux
jpdlla 13y ago
You should make “PLEB Stack” open source. Great work!
- rm2kdev 13y ago
  Early on saturday it was LEMP Framework :) i added some more and cleaned it up a little then it became PLEB :P https://github.com/rm2kdev/LEMPFramework https://github.com/rm2kdev/LEMPFramework Feel free to check out lemp :)
blueblob 13y ago
None of your text inputs seem to allow me to enter anything in firefox 26 on archlinux.
- rm2kdev 13y ago
  I'll take a look into that tomorow!! its 11:30pm here :(!
  - noir_lord 13y ago
    admin.css - Line 6846. padding: 20px 10px; which firefox obeys and pads in from the edges meaning the actual "viewport" is none-existent. If you reduce the padding down to 2px the text will come back but the vertical height on your inputs will reduce (I leave that to you) :). http://i.imgur.com/Ap7fA6r.jpg http://i.imgur.com/Ap7fA6r.jpg
    - rm2kdev 13y ago
      Thank you :) I will download and install a copy of firefox see if I can fix this up!
      - noir_lord 13y ago
        Just in case (since you don't have FF installed you might not be a user) grab Firebug at the same time :). Makes life much easier. Also check out nexmo I used them on a project last year (UK based) and they where excellent, also looking quickly 6.5c per text ;).
        rm2kdev 13y ago
        Thanks a lot, I used to be a Firefox user when I was younger maybe 7 years ago. It started to get very 'windows vista ish' and my really really poor pc couldn't handle it so maybe 4 - 5 years ago I switched to chrome... unfortunately that seems to be heading down the same path. Im not sure what modern firefox so lets see :D
        noir_lord 13y ago
        I use them interchangeably as some of the FireFox tools are better than Chrome's and vice versa (it's also handy for impromptu functional testing to switch around as I catch stuff before proper testing does).
        rm2kdev 13y ago
        Regrettably that was my poor decision to launch without checking it in Firefox, nevertheless bug fixed now :) learn from your mistakes haha
      - riquito 13y ago
        To not test a website on Firefox before launch isn't a bit extreme? (text input invisible is pretty bad)
  - cowls 13y ago
    hmmm, front page of hacker news (your target audience). May want to fix it now! :) Its a good opportunity. Site looks good otherwise
randlet 13y ago
On your register page you have "27/7" support. Is that meant to be 24/7 or is "27/7" something which I'm not aware of?
- rm2kdev 13y ago
  Thanks for pointing that out! ill fix it :D thats a typo or is it some kind of new age support
  - robmcm 13y ago
    Also on the billing page "You are currently on the tophat plan" (no space)
    - rm2kdev 13y ago
      That's because I'm using the planid to display the name I have to do some back end changes to subscriptions so I can have 'Friendly names' :)
- rm2kdev 13y ago
  Fixed ;) thank you for pointing that out.
robmcm 13y ago
I like it, impressive for such a short amount of time. I did notice the site is very slow, is that your hosting (HN effect) or the client side stack you are using? Navigating the pages was taking 5-6 seconds for me.
- rm2kdev 13y ago
  That would be the HN Effect. The post has exploded the site receiving something like 10 - 50 hits per second. It may also be the server is hosted in Sydney on Amazon's ec2 so if your far from Sydney Australia that might also contribute to a page load time of about 2 - 3 seconds :) the rest is probably HN Effect
  - robmcm 13y ago
    Oh right a 21,000 mile round trip would explain some of it ;)
    - noir_lord 13y ago
      An absolute minimum of 112ms of it ;).
almosnow 13y ago
Sorry for being "that guy" but this is not a full application neither did you spend two days making it work. :'(
- rm2kdev 13y ago
  I'm sorry you feel this way :( but I understand it is a small application. By Full Application I meant 'completed the goals it set out to do' obviously no application can ever be truly finished and I will be adding more over time :)
tim333 13y ago
Nice site. I like how the colour changes as you register. Did you consider digitalocean? Seems like it might be 1/3 the cost with better performance?
- rm2kdev 13y ago
  Thanks for the suggestion, I replied to the other gentlemen about this the only reason I didn't consider them was I had no prior experience or knew anyone who'd used them before. Their pricing looked 'too good to be true' but if HN is suggesting them I will defiantly look at their services soon :)
sneak 13y ago
Yes, let me use a monitoring system running on a single instance to let me know when important things go down. How about no? It's 2014. HA is part of the MVP when you are charging people money or providing a business-critical service (even if it's free).
- sehrope 13y ago
  > It's 2014. HA is part of the MVP when you are charging people money or providing a business-critical service (even if it's free). Business critical and free are mutually exclusive. A free service might be business critical for a business that relies on it but that's the faulty expectation of the business, not the provider. You get what you pay for. From the article: > 1. After evaluating a bunch of cloud server hosts I decided to go with an Amazon EC2 Tiny Instance running Ubuntu 12.04 my reasoning behind this was influenced by price and the technologies used in the development of the web application (which will be explained in a section below) namely NodeJS and MongoDB this comes at a cost of roughly $15/mo we’ll also be needing 1 elastic IP address and a few entries in route53 + $1 I'm a big fan of AWS but this won't work. I'm assuming that the "tiny" instance is an m1.micro. If so then then it will CPU throttle at the slightest load. You can run a whole bunch on a small slice of CPU but m1.micros are a different animal. Anybody that has tried running a build server on one knows that a compile alone will hang the instance. Again, you get what you pay for.
  - rm2kdev 13y ago
    While I agree with every point you make here about the EC2 Tiny m1micros. A good test for the instances was this article since posting this the site has received over 10,000 visitors and at one point in time it was dealing with 10 - 50 visitors a second while this isn't ideal to run 'business critical' software on a tiny instance if it ever had to deal with such a large array of consumers on a daily basis it would be scaled immediately to something more robust. However the past 10 hours have prooven that the m1's do have some balls :) both the site and the processing exist on the same machine and have only marginally struggled with 0 downtime from the HNEffect
janstenpickle 13y ago
Also sorry for being "that guy" but I have to point out that SSL is not used anywhere in the app, including the credit card entry in the billing section. Nice work though! :)
- rm2kdev 13y ago
  Thanks for your compliments and no worries you can be that guy today :P Regarding the payments side of things I am using the client side stripe library. Basically what happens when you input card details and hit submit a secure async push is made to stripe's servers where the card details are stored a call back is made with a token to your browse and ONLY that token is sent to my server. While having SSL would be nice and make the clients feel more comfortable rest assured the payments side of things is still secure SSL WILL BE ADDED :) Probably over next weekend my next personal 'sprint'
carlosdp 13y ago
It looks like you are over-paying for a lot of services. Like someone else mentioned, for starting out something like Linode or Digital Ocean would be cheaper. (and they don't charge for bandwidth until over 1 TB I believe) Also, 8c/message for SMS is very high. Twilio has international SMS service that ranges from .75c to around 3c a message. (disclaimer, I have interned there) On the implementation, it also seems like a NoSQL DB like MongoDB might not be the best choice. This is because it seems like you are dealing with a lot of relational information, which is significantly more complicated to implement in a non-relational database that is not designed for that. These are just my opinions. I like the front-end design!
- rm2kdev 13y ago
  Thanks for your suggestions, i had not considered Digital Ocean purely because I'd not had any experience with it or know anyone who's used it before. Regarding the relational data that is one of the challenges I faced when building the application. I used NoSQL because I had recently had some experience with mongo and mongoose thought it would be easier then I realised I would have to begin making multiple selects and concatenating data together to bring back average ping stats for the dashboard etc which made it somewhat harder.
aldarn 13y ago
None of the login / register / etc links are shown for me. In fact I can't see any links in the navbar at all... Using Chrome v24. Also, where is the pricing plan? Maybe that's just another link i'm missing but feels like this should be on the homepage / register screen somewhere (i munged the URL to sign up). Seems pretty cool though.
ATLobotomy 13y ago
I wish that hyperlinks could be used in a more Wikipedia like sense (I.e. linking to description s, other relevant content, instead of just being used to get links for Site Loader.
dclara 13y ago
Nice!

48 points by rm2kdev 13y ago

gremlinsinc 13y ago

Nice design/layout, not bad for a 2 day project.

rm2kdev 13y ago
Thanks, i cant take all the credit i am using twitter bootstrap for the ux

jpdlla 13y ago

You should make “PLEB Stack” open source. Great work!

rm2kdev 13y ago
Early on saturday it was LEMP Framework :) i added some more and cleaned it up a little then it became PLEB :P https://github.com/rm2kdev/LEMPFramework https://github.com/rm2kdev/LEMPFramework Feel free to check out lemp :)

blueblob 13y ago

None of your text inputs seem to allow me to enter anything in firefox 26 on archlinux.

rm2kdev 13y ago
I'll take a look into that tomorow!! its 11:30pm here :(!
- noir_lord 13y ago
  admin.css - Line 6846. padding: 20px 10px; which firefox obeys and pads in from the edges meaning the actual "viewport" is none-existent. If you reduce the padding down to 2px the text will come back but the vertical height on your inputs will reduce (I leave that to you) :). http://i.imgur.com/Ap7fA6r.jpg http://i.imgur.com/Ap7fA6r.jpg
  - rm2kdev 13y ago
    Thank you :) I will download and install a copy of firefox see if I can fix this up!
    - noir_lord 13y ago
      Just in case (since you don't have FF installed you might not be a user) grab Firebug at the same time :). Makes life much easier. Also check out nexmo I used them on a project last year (UK based) and they where excellent, also looking quickly 6.5c per text ;).
      - rm2kdev 13y ago
        Thanks a lot, I used to be a Firefox user when I was younger maybe 7 years ago. It started to get very 'windows vista ish' and my really really poor pc couldn't handle it so maybe 4 - 5 years ago I switched to chrome... unfortunately that seems to be heading down the same path. Im not sure what modern firefox so lets see :D
        noir_lord 13y ago
        I use them interchangeably as some of the FireFox tools are better than Chrome's and vice versa (it's also handy for impromptu functional testing to switch around as I catch stuff before proper testing does).
        rm2kdev 13y ago
        Regrettably that was my poor decision to launch without checking it in Firefox, nevertheless bug fixed now :) learn from your mistakes haha
    - riquito 13y ago
      To not test a website on Firefox before launch isn't a bit extreme? (text input invisible is pretty bad)
- cowls 13y ago
  hmmm, front page of hacker news (your target audience). May want to fix it now! :) Its a good opportunity. Site looks good otherwise

randlet 13y ago

On your register page you have "27/7" support. Is that meant to be 24/7 or is "27/7" something which I'm not aware of?

rm2kdev 13y ago
Thanks for pointing that out! ill fix it :D thats a typo or is it some kind of new age support
- robmcm 13y ago
  Also on the billing page "You are currently on the tophat plan" (no space)
  - rm2kdev 13y ago
    That's because I'm using the planid to display the name I have to do some back end changes to subscriptions so I can have 'Friendly names' :)
rm2kdev 13y ago
Fixed ;) thank you for pointing that out.

robmcm 13y ago

I like it, impressive for such a short amount of time. I did notice the site is very slow, is that your hosting (HN effect) or the client side stack you are using? Navigating the pages was taking 5-6 seconds for me.

rm2kdev 13y ago
That would be the HN Effect. The post has exploded the site receiving something like 10 - 50 hits per second. It may also be the server is hosted in Sydney on Amazon's ec2 so if your far from Sydney Australia that might also contribute to a page load time of about 2 - 3 seconds :) the rest is probably HN Effect
- robmcm 13y ago
  Oh right a 21,000 mile round trip would explain some of it ;)
  - noir_lord 13y ago
    An absolute minimum of 112ms of it ;).

almosnow 13y ago

Sorry for being "that guy" but this is not a full application neither did you spend two days making it work. :'(

rm2kdev 13y ago
I'm sorry you feel this way :( but I understand it is a small application. By Full Application I meant 'completed the goals it set out to do' obviously no application can ever be truly finished and I will be adding more over time :)

tim333 13y ago

Nice site. I like how the colour changes as you register. Did you consider digitalocean? Seems like it might be 1/3 the cost with better performance?

rm2kdev 13y ago
Thanks for the suggestion, I replied to the other gentlemen about this the only reason I didn't consider them was I had no prior experience or knew anyone who'd used them before. Their pricing looked 'too good to be true' but if HN is suggesting them I will defiantly look at their services soon :)

sneak 13y ago

Yes, let me use a monitoring system running on a single instance to let me know when important things go down. How about no? It's 2014. HA is part of the MVP when you are charging people money or providing a business-critical service (even if it's free).

sehrope 13y ago
> It's 2014. HA is part of the MVP when you are charging people money or providing a business-critical service (even if it's free). Business critical and free are mutually exclusive. A free service might be business critical for a business that relies on it but that's the faulty expectation of the business, not the provider. You get what you pay for. From the article: > 1. After evaluating a bunch of cloud server hosts I decided to go with an Amazon EC2 Tiny Instance running Ubuntu 12.04 my reasoning behind this was influenced by price and the technologies used in the development of the web application (which will be explained in a section below) namely NodeJS and MongoDB this comes at a cost of roughly $15/mo we’ll also be needing 1 elastic IP address and a few entries in route53 + $1 I'm a big fan of AWS but this won't work. I'm assuming that the "tiny" instance is an m1.micro. If so then then it will CPU throttle at the slightest load. You can run a whole bunch on a small slice of CPU but m1.micros are a different animal. Anybody that has tried running a build server on one knows that a compile alone will hang the instance. Again, you get what you pay for.
- rm2kdev 13y ago
  While I agree with every point you make here about the EC2 Tiny m1micros. A good test for the instances was this article since posting this the site has received over 10,000 visitors and at one point in time it was dealing with 10 - 50 visitors a second while this isn't ideal to run 'business critical' software on a tiny instance if it ever had to deal with such a large array of consumers on a daily basis it would be scaled immediately to something more robust. However the past 10 hours have prooven that the m1's do have some balls :) both the site and the processing exist on the same machine and have only marginally struggled with 0 downtime from the HNEffect

janstenpickle 13y ago

Also sorry for being "that guy" but I have to point out that SSL is not used anywhere in the app, including the credit card entry in the billing section. Nice work though! :)

rm2kdev 13y ago
Thanks for your compliments and no worries you can be that guy today :P Regarding the payments side of things I am using the client side stripe library. Basically what happens when you input card details and hit submit a secure async push is made to stripe's servers where the card details are stored a call back is made with a token to your browse and ONLY that token is sent to my server. While having SSL would be nice and make the clients feel more comfortable rest assured the payments side of things is still secure SSL WILL BE ADDED :) Probably over next weekend my next personal 'sprint'

carlosdp 13y ago

It looks like you are over-paying for a lot of services. Like someone else mentioned, for starting out something like Linode or Digital Ocean would be cheaper. (and they don't charge for bandwidth until over 1 TB I believe) Also, 8c/message for SMS is very high. Twilio has international SMS service that ranges from .75c to around 3c a message. (disclaimer, I have interned there) On the implementation, it also seems like a NoSQL DB like MongoDB might not be the best choice. This is because it seems like you are dealing with a lot of relational information, which is significantly more complicated to implement in a non-relational database that is not designed for that. These are just my opinions. I like the front-end design!

rm2kdev 13y ago
Thanks for your suggestions, i had not considered Digital Ocean purely because I'd not had any experience with it or know anyone who's used it before. Regarding the relational data that is one of the challenges I faced when building the application. I used NoSQL because I had recently had some experience with mongo and mongoose thought it would be easier then I realised I would have to begin making multiple selects and concatenating data together to bring back average ping stats for the dashboard etc which made it somewhat harder.

aldarn 13y ago

None of the login / register / etc links are shown for me. In fact I can't see any links in the navbar at all... Using Chrome v24. Also, where is the pricing plan? Maybe that's just another link i'm missing but feels like this should be on the homepage / register screen somewhere (i munged the URL to sign up). Seems pretty cool though.

ATLobotomy 13y ago

I wish that hyperlinks could be used in a more Wikipedia like sense (I.e. linking to description s, other relevant content, instead of just being used to get links for Site Loader.

dclara 13y ago

Nice!